Chinese Investors Acquire Stake in Global Switch for £2.4Bn

The company, which is based in London, is a leader in developing and running large scale, carrier and cloud neutral data centres both in Asia and throughout Europe. Its main shareholder Aldersgate Investment will now control the firm together with Elegant Jubilee— whose main sponsor is Zhangjiagang-based steelmaker Shagang Group.

Global Switch’s overall value has been estimated to be around £5 billion.

The deal comes just one year after the sale of another British data centre company to overseas investors: in January, UK ‘s Telecity was bought off by American multinational Equinix for £2.35 billion.

This case, though, is likely to spark more concerns regarding the national security implications of Chinese entities controlling British data centres. Over the last few years, the UK has grown increasingly wary of using China-manufactured software or equipment —such as CCTV cameras— to gather and handle UK-generated information.

Global Switch has tried to assuage the worries by guaranteeing its data centres will keep sticking to the UK regulation on the matter.

“We are tremendously excited to be investing in Global Switch, which has grown to become one of the world’s leading data centre companies,” Elegant Jubilee’s key member and entrepreneur Li Qiang said in a statement. “We believe that bringing together the high quality data centres and operational excellence of Global Switch with the rapidly growing demand from Chinese customers creates a perfect match that will deliver significant future growth opportunities.”

Global Switch CEO John Corcoran also commented: “This investment will continue to open up opportunities for Global Switch to become the data centre provider of choice for new customers from across the globe, and especially Chinese companies growing in Asia and Europe and Western companies growing in China.”